PREDEAL CHALET – The Brass Forest

Not as an afterthought, not as a final selection from a catalogue – but as a generative act. A solid walnut oval, carried by legs cast as brass tree trunks, topped with removable brass leaves. Custom. Singular. The kind of object that doesn’t decorate a room but commands it. Everything else grew from that decision – the choice to build an interior where the forest doesn’t stay outside.

Wood is the protagonist. In every form it agrees to take: chevron oak parquet running continuously underfoot, exposed beams overhead, timber‑clad walls, custom shutters, bespoke furniture, hand‑turned details. The interior is not decorated with wood – it is built from it, the way a forest is built from trees. Each application is different; the material logic is the same throughout.

The design moves between two registers without apology. Rustic and urban. Raw and refined. Mountain warmth and contemporary precision. These are not contradictions – they are the point. The house holds both, in order to offer the comfortable familiarity of the townhouse and the quietness of the alpine retreat.

The double‑height living volume is the spatial heart of the interior. A custom bookcase wraps its central opening, dissolving the boundary between architecture and storage. A dark‑colored sliding door introduces a note of industrial precision against the warmth of oak and plaster. The oval dining table anchors the space below three oversized dome pendants – a composition that rewards looking at from above as much as from within.

The color palette is intentionally neutral, earthy, borrowing from the bark of the trees, with just a few accents – the green of the kitchen cabinets and some small decorative elements.

Where most mountain interiors default to safe rusticity, the bathrooms make a different choice entirely. Deep green handmade tiles clad the walls floor‑to‑ceiling, their scalloped arches cut with deliberate confidence. The drama is not decorative – it is a position. Stone, brass, and dark metal move through these spaces without compromise.

The master bathroom faces the trees. A freestanding tub sits at its center, framed by stone and black metal, oriented toward a wide window and an unobstructed line of spruce. The room does not compete with the landscape. It was designed to hold space for it.

The children’s bedroom is a forest interior within a forest house – mural‑covered walls, a sage‑painted ceiling, a loft bed that becomes a treehouse. A room that takes childhood seriously.This is a house that knows exactly what it is.
Architecture & interior design: Piano:Terra
Photography: Sabin Prodan